Backup

In light of the hard drive failure suffered during the week I've been giving much thought to my future data backup requirements, not just from a business point of view but personal as well.
 
My current employer suffered a devastating fire just over 3 years ago. Our 10,000sq feet building was completely gutted in about 15 minutes. Luckily no-one was injured in the stampede to get away from the flames. The nature of the business meant we had large amounts of nasty chemicals that in the right (wrong) conditions would explode, and they did, anyway I digress. At the time the building was also home to the R&D department for the whole worldwide organisation. The data we had stored on the servers was irreplaceable and would have ended the business if we could not support our customers on their current development projects let alone the history of current and previous products in production. As fate would have it the IT manager was on holiday and the daily backups had been left to a mere minion to manage the tapes and store them offsite. The conversation went something like this...
 
BOFH: Where was the last backup tape?
PFY: In the tape drive.
BOFH: Where were the previous backup tapes?
PFY: In the server room.
BOFH: In the fire safe?
PFY: No.
 
I'll not go into the finer details of what followed but we did manage to locate the fire damaged servers, pull the hard disks and rip the data. A previous set of backup tapes were found and in all we lost maybe a days worth of data.
 
All this, as you can imagine, was a sobering experience and one I fully intend to learn from when we get our business up and running. So what should I propose as a backup procedure? I'll have to think about that. Cost will be an issue, as the procedure will also plan for hardware failure requiring redundancy of actual computers etc. This one HD failure means I can't access the data on the perfectly good slave drive. This would lead me to thinking of an external HD for backup or even network storage so that it could be moved from machine to machine if required. All critical data (current projects) will not only be stored on 2 separate machines but backuped daily as well to the external HD. Older data would be stored on the external HD as well as archived and stored offsite on CDs or DVDs. All this for a small 2 man company hopelessly reliant on IT. Makes you think if there isn't a business opportunity to offer low cost IT support for similar small companies that don't have the time or skills to do it for themselves. They are left to fend for themselves probably relying on some family member who has a PS2 but knows all about computers. Hmmm... this will be how these small companies get their godawful websites too.
 
I was BTs Broadband campaigner for my area which gave me some exposure to the total lack of thought people give to data backup, online security from viruses and worms etc. Businesses whose existence depends on IT but who have no procedure to protect themselves from disaster and most of them are running on Windows98! The mind boggles.

Category:

• Business
• Computer
• Data